“I care too much,” Jeff says. “I worry about everyone. My girlfriend. My mom. My little sisters. I have an extreme heart.”
Jeff, 17, is in the juvenile detention center on a minor in possession charge.
“Yeah,” Jorge says. He looks around at the circle of boys. “Me, too. I stress out about the people I love. I worry about them all the time.
“I hate that I love them so much,” he adds, staring at the floor.
Jorge is 16 and belongs to one of the gangs in town.
“I’m the opposite,” says Mario. “I hate people who love me.”
There is silence in the circle. Mario has a bright blonde streak in his dark hair and a gentle way about him. He speaks in a soft voice and has a slight lisp. He doesn’t seem like a person filled with hate.
“Who do you hate?” Jeff asks.
“Everybody. I hate everybody,” Mario says without a trace of anger or bitterness in his voice.
“Why?” Jeff asks.
Mario shifts in his chair, looks around the circle, shrugs. I get the feeling that he knows they understand.
“I had my hopes crushed a lot when I was young,” Mario says. “Bad things happened in my childhood. So, trust, you know, it’s hard to trust. I only have a few friends. And I hate adults. They’re all phonies. They say they love you and then they do bad things.”
“Yeah, they’re all fakes,” Rickie, 12, says. “They say they’re going to help you, they say they care about you, but then they don’t do anything to help you. You just can’t trust them.”
“Right,” Jorge nods his head. “It’s all about trust. I hate it when you can’t trust someone.”
I listen to the boys talk and I think about how fast the group transitioned from love to hate. The two emotions are joined at the hip, of course. Love can be stressful, especially if you have “an extreme heart.”
Love hurts, and when it hurts too much -- when trust, hope, and faith in others are crushed time and time again -- hate sometimes finds its way into the heart. Sometimes hate settles in permanently.
The heart, I believe, contracts and expands, allowing a landing place for both love and hate. But love is stronger, for no matter how much hate fills our hearts and souls, love that lasts, love that does not judge, love that does not give up can find a way to soften hate’s hard edges and make room for trust, hope, and faith again.
My brilliant friend and coauthor Ernie Kurtz explained it this way. He said we’re all born into a kind of paradoxical “4-H Club.” If we get close enough to Hug someone, then we are close enough to Be Hugged by that person, but we are also close enough to Hit or to Be Hit – even if the blow is accidental.
In a similar way, if we let people close enough to Heal us, then they are also close enough for us to Heal them. But in coming that close, we can also Hurt each other.
Hugging and Hitting. Hurting and Healing. Maybe you remember the real-life story of David Vetter, born with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease (SCID). David lived his entire life in a sterile plastic bubble because a single germ, one unsterilized touch, would have been fatal to him. His parents, nurses, and doctors reached through the hermetically sealed opening in the bubble wearing sterilized gloves.
Sealed off, isolated, in permanent quarantine, the boy was literally “untouchable.” His parents, hoping for a cure, agreed to a bone marrow transplant but the operation introduced a virus into his protective bubble and David died a few months later. He was 12 years old.
“The only time I could touch him was as he was dying,” his mother remembered many years after David’s death. “Wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time.”
Touching can heal, but it can also hurt. I thought about that as I listen to Jeff, Jorge, Mario, and Rickie.
“I care about people too much,” Jeff says. “It hurts a lot.”
“Yeah,” Mario says, his voice even softer than usual. “It’s hard to love.”
